The Well-Tempered Beacon

After the disappointments of so-called "Real-Time" Clocks, I was pleased when the postman delivered a GPS module today...

I had ordered the module from Hans, g0upl, who offers them at a fantastic price (an important consideration for a cheapskate like me).

Thanks to the excellent TinyGPS library, the module was supremely easy to interface to my Arduino-based beacon. I deliberately used the Arduino MEGA with its lavish resources to exploit an additional hardware serial interface (not wanting to get tangled up with the "UART" used for connection with the PC during the development phase) but this will run on the basic Occam's Beacon hardware with a humble little UNO.

Here's the system "on the bench" (actually, on top of a Leslie speaker - the only vacant, nearby flat surface)...

Nearby, on the cill of a north-facing window, sits the little module, powered by 5V from the Arduino and sending back, in return, 9600 baud NMEA data...

The whole shebang works like a dream - just turn on the beacon and it starts in perfect time. No more clock watching and reset pressing. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'

The beacon is doing its perfectly a tempo thing on 30m even as we speak. I'll post the code once I get it tidied up and ready for your enjoyment.

...-.- de m0xpd